Bridging Learning Communities: A Summer Workshop for Social Studies Teachers

TYPICAL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT for teachers was described in a 1995 report of the National Governors' Association as being "the educational equivalent of junk food."' It is rare that a participant leaves a week-long workshop and enthusiastically says that it was "excellent [and a] very worthwhile expenditure of my time!" Yet this was the reaction given by an overwhelming majority of twenty secondary social studies teachers and librarians who participated in a week-long workshop sponsored by the Center for the Teaching of American History on the campus of Binghamton University during the summer of 2002. Funding for this workshop was a Teaching American History Program grant from the Department of Education. The overall goals and purpose of this series of grants were clearly outlined in a 2003 article in this journal by Alex Stein. In the same issue, other grant recipients explained that the success of their programs was due to their focus on content, and on providing hands-on experience. In particular, the facilitators of a seminar run at the University of New Hampshire commented that many teachers asked for a greater emphasis on discussing curricular problems and on sharing lessons between teachers.2 At the time that we planned our first workshop, we had little contact with other grant recipients, but we nevertheless designed our workshop along similar lines. We repeated this formula